1981-82 O-Pee-Chee Wayne Gretzky #106

the card

notes

This is Gretzky's third-year card, and the season on the back of it is the one nobody has come close to since.

In 1981-82 he scored 92 goals and 212 points. Both remain records. He reached fifty goals in thirty-nine games, which also remains a record, and he was twenty-one years old. The card in front of you was printed before any of that happened - O-Pee-Chee shot it during the season before.

He is on six cards in this set. This one and card 125 are both straight Gretzky cards; 126 is an Oilers Leaders, 383 an Assists Leader, 384 a Scoring Leader and 392 a Record Breaker. Card 106 is the one collectors mean.

What has been graded

PSA has recorded 2,485 base grades and 22 are PSA 10 - a gem rate of 0.89 per cent.

That is low even for this set, which gems at 7.4 per cent overall. The distribution shows why: the population bunches at PSA 6, 7 and 8 with 517, 532 and 548 copies, and falls off a cliff above that. Only 196 have reached 9.

Centring and O-Pee-Chee's cutting are the reasons, as they are across the whole 1981-82 set.

The widest aggregator gap on this site

Beckett has recorded 524 copies of this card. Three are Pristine 10 and fifty more are 9.5.

Add those together, as aggregators do, and Beckett reports 53 gems - a rate of 10.1 per cent against PSA's 0.8. On that reading Beckett is twelve times more generous than PSA, which would be the largest gap we have found anywhere.

It is not what is happening. A Beckett 9.5 is a 9.5.

Tens against tens: Beckett has awarded three in 524 copies, a rate of 0.57 per cent, against PSA's 0.89. PSA is the looser of the two at the top, not the stricter.

SGC has 235 copies and has never awarded this card a 10. CGC has 53 and its best is a 9. So across four companies and 3,297 recorded copies, twenty-five cards sit at the top.

A signature is worth eleven grades here

Six sales are on record at Heritage, and two of them are PSA 7s.

An unsigned PSA 7 made $97 in February 2023. A signed PSA 7, certified by PSA/DNA, made $1,067.50 in June 2026 - eleven times the money for the same grade.

The signed 7 also beat a PSA 9 that sold for $762.50 in September 2025, and came within forty-five dollars of a PSA 9 from July 2021.

So on this card the autograph is worth more than two grades. That is the opposite of how most collectors price a card, and it is the clearest example of it this site has recorded.

And the tens have gone quiet

Two PSA 10s have sold publicly, both in 2016 - $1,912 in May and $2,390 in November.

Twenty-two exist. None has sold at public auction in the ten years since, so there is no current reading on what one is worth, only what two were worth a decade ago.

population

PSA

graded elsewhere

recorded 19 sep 2026. figures are a snapshot on that date, not a live count.

recorded sales

dated past results, not an estimate of what a copy is worth today. figures published by an auction house normally include the buyer's premium, so they are more than the seller received.

where to buy one

PSA 8 is where this card lives. There are 548 of them, more than any other grade, and it is a good-looking card that costs very little.

PSA 9, at 196 copies, is the sensible stretch and has sold at $1,110 and $762.50.

PSA 10 is a market with no recent evidence. Twenty-two exist and the last public sale was in 2016. Anyone quoting a current figure is estimating.

Think hard before paying a Beckett premium here. Beckett has awarded three 10s against PSA's twenty-two, so a BGS Pristine 10 is genuinely scarcer - but fifty cards sit at 9.5 and they are a different object. Read the number, not the aggregate.

Consider a signed copy seriously. A certified signature was worth eleven times the unsigned price on the same grade, and more than two grades of condition. If you want a Gretzky rather than a grade, a signed mid-grade card is the value in this card's record.

Expect rough cutting and check centring first. It is why a card with nearly two and a half thousand graded copies has twenty-two tens.

Confirm the card number. Gretzky is on six cards in this set and only 106 and 125 are straight player cards.

what to check before you buy

Check centring on both sides before anything else. It is the main reason this card's gem rate is under one per cent.

Look along all four edges for O-Pee-Chee's rough cut. It is original to the printing rather than handling, but it still caps the grade.

Confirm the card number on the label. Gretzky appears six times in this set and the leader and record-breaker cards are different cards at different prices.

Check the back is bilingual. O-Pee-Chee prints English and French; the Topps version of this year does not, and Topps split cards 67 to 132 into regional East and West runs that O-Pee-Chee never used.

If the card is signed, check the certification is on the signature and not only the card. The premium here attaches to a PSA/DNA certified autograph.

If the label says Beckett, read the number and the word together. Pristine 10 is the ceiling and there are three; 9.5 is a half grade lower and there are fifty.

sources